All through the last century, the scientific community has been in agreement over the third law of thermodynamics; that absolute zero cannot be achieved in a physical system because it is not possible for the entropy or disorder of the system to hit zero. The major controversy behind the theory was, however, true that may be, is it feasible to prove the theory?
The law itself, brought forth by the German scientist Walther Nernst, is based on two scientific principles; one, the entropy of the physical system must be zero and secondly, on the principle of unattainability which states that it is impossible for a system to attain zero entropy. With that in mind, a team of two scientists namely Dr. Lluis Masanes and Jonathan Oppenheim from the University College of London set out to end the debate on the law’s validity by use of quantum mechanics.
“You cannot cool a system to absolute zero temperature with a finite amount of resources,” Masanes told IFLScience. He went on to say that if that is correct, then it also goes that absolute zero temperature cannot be reached within a finite amount of time. Once he and Oppenheim had established that fact, they then set out to prove that there is a relationship between time and the lowest possible temperature and that that relationship is the speed of cooling, he further told IFLScience.
The two scientists took the theory as a sort of computation; if a system were cooler, the particles within it would be expected to be slower and vice versa. A system with more energy would have more active particles, but there would be no way of establishing the state of those particles. It is in that vein that the research team concluded that no entropy could be achieved at absolute zero temperature as no one can tell how such a system in that particular temperature would look like, especially within a finite time frame. This ‘speed limit’ on cooling proves that there is no way to reach entropy in a limited time at the absolute zero.
Also, borrowing from the second law of thermodynamics which states that energy will always move from a region of higher energy to one of lower energy, Masanes’ and Oppenheim’s paper in Nature Communications posted that since there would always be a shift of energy within the environment, then it would be impossible for entropy to occur.
“The impact of this monumental discovery in the scientific community are only theoretical at the moment,” said co-writer Jonathan Oppenheim. However, it goes without saying that just realizing that there is a limit to the speed of cooling goes a long way as it enables new researchers and physicists to find a leeway to the application of the discovery. If the results of the development are applied, it will be possible to observe the behavior of different atoms, even different materials, at this temperature. There is even talk about the use of this very discovery in the refinement of the quantum computer.
